Miami's digital game design program among nation's best: "Liberal arts of the 21st century"

03/22/2013

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Global Game Jam 2013: Miami's Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies hosts Ohio's largest Global Game Jam. Participants worldwide design and create digital and non-digital games over the course of one weekend.

Miami University has earned an Honorable Mention on The Princeton Review's 2013 list of the best undergraduate schools in the U.S. and Canada for studying video game design. Only 30 undergraduate programs were recognized nationally and in Canada.

Compiled by The Princeton Review, the list names 15 undergraduate schools in rank order and 15 undergraduate schools as Honorable Mentions. The fourth annual list was compiled using a survey of 150 institutions offering video game design coursework and/ or degrees.

Miami also ranked in the top 30 schools in 2012 and in The Princeton Review’s first ranking of video game design schools in 2010. (Miami was not surveyed in 2011).

“Great game design and analysis involves all the liberal arts, from narrative and storytelling to psychology, from business to art and more.”

“Instead of merely focusing on helping students get their first job in games, we provide an education that allows participation in the growth of digital games by coupling game design with everything from marketing, education, art, law, language and just about anything a student might be interested in doing,” said Lindsay Grace, Armstrong Professor of Creative Arts and co-director of the Games and Learning Center within AIMS.

“My current capstone course just released three mobile games on Google Play,” Grace said. “They made the game using a reduced timeline of just six weeks. The students then use the rest of the time to market the games and increase installs.”